If you're over 30, like I am, you'll recall a time when you had to hit up the library or your family's rec room
To find that multi-volume set of encyclopaedias that you needed to write that report on African Wild Dogs,
how clouds form, or the Xiphoid process. There was no instant gratification of Googling.
Whether you were looking up the mating habits of cuttlefish, the science of bee-keeping, or St.Elmo's Fire,
I bet you took the ease of gathering that information for granted, just like we do today.
But whether you do it using dead trees or the Internet, the very idea of cataloguing everything we know about the world
Can be credited to one Pliny the Elder.
So who was this ubiquitous dude, and why does he seem to pop up everywhere from alchemy to zoology?
(Intro music)
Gaius Plinius Cecilius Secundus was a Roman scholar, statesman, and military commander
but you know him as Pliny the Elder.
You remember him as "the Elder" not because he was old for his entire life
but because his nephew, also named Pliny, rose to fame as an imperial lawyer
and we don't want to get our Plinys mixed up. That would be terrible.
Born around 23 CE just a stone's throw away from George Clooney's current boat dock
in modern-day Lake Como, Pliny the Elder was likely from decent but not extravagant means.
Educated in literature, law, rhetoric and military training, he rose to become a cavalry commander
in the Roman army. The man was definitely busy, but in between reading, writing, and advising,
he made time to write an incredible amount of material - at least 75 books, along with countless unpublished notebooks.
His most famous, and only surviving book was Historia Naturalis, or "Natural History,"
one of the most influential books ever written in Latin.
This was no normal book: it was a 37-volume book, a comprehensive beast collection
documenting everything the Romans knew about the natural world.
In his preface, Pliny outlines 20,000 "remedies, researches, and observations"
related to cosmology, geography, humans, animals, plants, agriculture, medicine, minerals,
and a number of oddities compiled from 100 principal authors.
Other readers estimate these figures were closer to 400 sources and nearly 35,000 observations.
It was the first encyclopaedia of its kind, and it was glorious.
While other works of the time tended to be largely influenced by the authors' own opinions,
Pliny's book remained the unique exception.
He wasn't trying to promote any sort of philosophical worldview;
he simply wanted the reader to know how many types of lettuce you could grow,
and what kind of trees produced pitch, and how much an elephant weighed.
To him, nature was the sum of all its delicately detailed parts.
In this context, "historia" didn't so much mean "history" as it meant "research".
So Historia Naturalis might be better described as "the research of creation".
It wasn't enough just to know your way around nature. He wanted to count and itemize this knowledge -
something that today is standard practice.
Now Pliny had something to say about almost everything in the natural world, but that didn't mean he was always right.
The book touches on mermaids, and dog-faced tribes, headless people with eyes in their shoulders
(that's freaking me out)
but despite its flaws, Historia Naturalis got a lot of stuff right, and remains an invaluable source
on ancient Roman life.
As the Greek and Roman civilizations declined, and many classic texts were lost,
Pliny's Natural History became an often-copied, one-stop general education
well into the Middle Ages, and much of the text was poached by subsequent encyclopedists.
It was a vital source of scientific information - and entertainment.
Pliny lived an interesting life right up until his untimely death in Pompeii in 79AD,
in the volcanic fallout from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
Accounts vary, but it seems that he was safe at sea with the Roman fleet
when he decided to head into land, either to try to save a friend, reassure panicked citizens,
or just because he was so curious that he wanted to document what was happening.
What was happening was a whole lot of nightmare.
Likely, Pliny died from the fumes of the eruption, but he left a legacy that still sits on bookshelves around the world.
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